1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to the field of printed circuit board assemblies and, more particularly, to a new and improved method for repairing and/or reworking the conductor traces of a printed circuit board assembly.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The repair and/or rework of Printed Circuit Board Assemblies (PCBA) is currently performed by mechanically modifying the existing conductor traces found on the PCBA and manually establishing new conductor traces. In the repair of a PCBA conductor, a damaged or severed conductor trace is repaired by bridging the damaged conductor trace with solder. When the trace has sufficient width the repair can be made by soldering a wire conductor across the damaged conductor trace. In the rework of a PCBA, such as when a conductive path from one PCBA mounted component to the another PCBA component is changed for engineering purposes, the existing trace is cut causing a break in the conductive path. Then a wire conductor is manually soldered between the component leads to make the desired new connection. If the repair or rework is very extensive, a new artwork is generated, incorporating all of the repair/rework changes, and a new PCBA is manufactured.
Manual repair and/or rework of a PCBA is a very cumbersome and labor intensive process. It is not unusual to have over 40 man hours of labor expended in the repair and/or rework of a single PCBA. Additionally, the long term reliability of a reconstructed PCBA suffers due to the quality of the repair. For example, poor solder connections may cause intermittent signal loss or may break and fail. Conductor wires routed from one component to the another may be damaged from handling of the PCBA leading to the failure of the connections.
The current invention solves these aforementioned problems by providing a method for repairing and/or reworking a PCBA by extruding a conductive resin between the required new connection points. The present invention eliminates the manual soldering of wire conductors as a repair and/or rework medium, thereby, reducing the time and effort needed to effect the change.
Accordingly, it is the object of the present invention to disclose a new and improved method for repairing and/or reworking the conductor traces of a PCBA by extruding a conductive resin between the required new connection points.